North America

Upmarket apartment buildings in New York usually have doormen, who help you with your bags, open taxi doors, or hold an umbrella over you as you step from taxi to front door. Great service, or awkward, as it's perfectly easy to open a taxi door yourself? British-born Judith Kampfner finds it embarrassing to deal with the closest American equivalent of servants.

Across the border in Canada, a "mountie" policeman of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has stirred up a debate. He was filmed smoking marijuana in uniform. But this was medical marijuana, prescribed by a doctor for post-traumatic stress disorder. Medical marijuana is legal in Canada, and the mountie's bosses had accepted his diagnosis and treatment and had simply put him on desk duty, without fire arms. Then a video surfaced of him smoking his marijuana in uniform, in public. Sian Griffiths on the mountie who caused a storm that's dividing the Canadian public.